


K-Science You Should Know, Episode: "How the Conn-Pod Works"

by bat_country



Series: KSYSK [1]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, K-Science You Should Know Pacific Rim AU, KSYSK, it is simply my love letter to both Newton/Hermann and to SYSK, there is no fluff or cuteness or porn or ANYTHING really, this is simply the dullest fic ever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-28
Updated: 2013-10-28
Packaged: 2017-12-30 18:00:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1021704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bat_country/pseuds/bat_country
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <b>Pacific Rim AU where (mostly) everything is the same except every Tuesday and Thursday, a new episode of the podcast “K-Science You Should Know,” often abbreviated KSYSK, is released. </b>
</p><p> </p><p>  <i>"How many people would a kaiju have to eat daily to sustain itself? What’s the deal with the Pons technology patent controversy? Join Newt and Hermann as they explore the K-Science You Should Know about everything from Kaiju Blue to what’s in the Breach in this podcast from the PPDC."</i></p><p> </p><p>Here are snippets from the KSYSK episode titled “How the Conn-Pod Works.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	K-Science You Should Know, Episode: "How the Conn-Pod Works"

**Author's Note:**

> In my weird little AU, the "K-Science You Should Know" podcast operates very similarly to the podcast that inspired it -- Stuff You Should Know. (I can't properly express to you how much I adore it. KSYSK is a homage born out of LOVE, pure LOVE, you guys.) Anyway, much like for SYSK, Hermann and Newt plan each episode's topic and study up by themselves, but do not discuss the material or script anything ahead of time. As a result, their podcast is as spontaneous and free-flowing as possible. Each episode runs an average of about 30 - 40 minutes, which is reason number 1 why I only wrote snippets instead of an entire transcript. Reason number 2 is way more obvious: to get around all the Pacific Rim science that I didn't want to make wild claims about, didn't know enough about, or stuff we didn't get enough information about!
> 
> good grief there's [accompanying art](http://baldwinboy5ive.tumblr.com/post/65327943828/you-know-in-case-those-of-you-who-i-told-that)

[opening music] 

 

 **HERMANN:** "Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Hermann Gottlieb. With me as always is Newton W. 'Newt' Geiszler."

 **NEWT:** "Hermann's wearing his snazzy bow tie today, and I'm in my old band t-shirt."

 **HERMANN:** "That makes this K-Science You Should Know!" 

 **NEWT:** "I've got a bit of an intro for this one."

 **HERMANN:** "Do go on."

 **NEWT:** "Ever heard of a diving bell, Hermann?"

 **HERMANN:** [laughs] "You know I have, Newton." 

 **NEWT:** "Well, it's an ancient device."

 **HERMANN:** "That's right, Newton. We even know that Aristotle mentioned the use of a diving bell. That was about 2,400 years ago!" 

 **NEWT:** "You wanna explain to our listeners what a diving bell is?" 

 **HERMANN: "** Well, to start, it's a device that was used to convey divers underwater, allowing them to breathe -- at least until the air runs out. It works under the same principle as when you push a cup down straight into water so that a pocket of air is still inside of the cup.”

 **NEWT:** "Right, and would you believe such an ancient apparatus actually has a lot to do with what we're talking about today?" 

 **HERMANN:** "The Conn-Pod was designed with a lot of the same concepts in mind, so yes." 

 **NEWT:** "At least pretend to be amazed, Hermann." 

 **HERMANN:** "It _is_ amazing!" 

 **NEWT:** "There's that smile."

 **HERMANN:** [laughs]

 **NEWT:** "Well, divers back then, and jaeger pilots today: What's the one problem they both have in common?"

 **HERMANN: "** Hmm. Clunky attire?" 

 **NEWT:** [chuckles] "You're one to talk." 

 **HERMANN:** "Hah." 

 **NEWT:** "The answer, which of course I know _you_ know, is pressure." 

 **HERMANN:** "Atmospheric pressure under the deep, deep sea, and along with it, decompression sickness." 

 **NEWT:** [spooky voice] "THE BE-E-E-E-E-ENNNDDDS!!!" 

[both laugh]

 **HERMANN:** "Well, today we're talking about how the Conn-Pod works, and we'll cover _that_ as well -- how the Conn-Pod was designed to compensate for the changes in atmospheric pressure." 

 **NEWT:** "It's jaeger tech!" 

 **HERMANN:** "Well, yes. I guess that's it for this episode, then. That's the answer." 

 **NEWT:** [laughs] "Hah, yeah. Our shortest show ever." 

 **HERMANN:** "Yes."

 **NEWT:** "Not so fast, Hermann. We still got lots of ground to cover." 

 **HERMANN: "** Oh, right." 

 **NEWT:** "We'll talk about the bends later. But first, in order to do that, we have to discuss the actual design of the Conn-Pod. Let's start by talking about how that drive suit was designed to connect to the Conn-Pod." 

 

== 

 

 **HERMANN:** "Right, all of that is compressed air inside the bell. The oxygen and the nitrogen in your bloodstream get compressed as well, and so they dissolve -- not an issue for the oxygen, because the surrounding tissues will absorb it. The nitrogen is a different story. It stays dissolved in the blood, until you decompress. And then what, Newton?"

 **NEWT:** "Then you have a Radiohead album."

 **HERMANN:** "The -- yes -- sure. Yes." [sighs]

 **NEWT:** [laughs] "Yeah, that's what the bends is. When the nitrogen under lowered pressure becomes undissolved and turns back into gas - as gasses do - go look up Boyle's law if you're confused, folks -- it forms bubbles that block your blood vessels. You could have a heart attack or stroke if you try to come up to the surface too quickly." 

 **HERMANN:** "And the bubbles could go into your joints, causing terrible pain. That is the reason why the bends can leave the sufferer crippled." 

 **NEWT:** "Hint: that's not what happened to ol' Hermann here." 

 **HERMANN:** "I'll never tell on the air." 

 **NEWT:** "You guys can't see it but Hermann's winking right now." 

 **HERMANN:** "Well, you’re never going to tell the listeners what you once got arrested for, and you get to be mysterious about it. I've got to have something, too!" 

 **NEWT:** "You gotta keep 'em guessing, Herm." 

 **HERMANN: [** clears throat] "Back to the Conn-Pod." 

 **NEWT:** "Yeah. We don't want our jaeger pilots stuck in decompression chambers for days after every kaiju battle, do we?" 

 **HERMANN:** "No, we do not. Let's talk about how the jaeger tech gets us around that particular little inconvenience."

 

==

 

 **NEWT:** “The Conn-Pod’s also equipped with fresh air. Quick jump back into the history lesson for a second, though. Let’s look at the origins of this idea. Back in 1689, this French guy called Denis Papin found a way to get fresh air into the diving bells by using hoses. They were attached to bellows, up on a ship or something.”

 **HERMANN:** “Newton, I’ve been meaning to ask you, why on earth do you have bellows in the K-Science lab? You don’t even use them!”

 **NEWT:** “They will come in handy someday, Herm, I promise you.”

 **HERMANN:** “For what, might I ask?!”

 **NEWT:** “I don’t know what, yet! Otherwise I would tell you! I just know that they _will_ come in handy one day, that’s all. Dude, if you throw them out, I will smear kaiju guts on your chalkboard, so _don’t_.”

 **HERMANN:** [sighs] “Forget I asked.” [sighs again] “Do continue.”

 **NEWT:** “Well. Right. Okay. So, I was saying that this guy used bellows to supply fresh air into the diving bells, right? Well, that was like the first big innovation. Then just a year later, this dude Edmund Halley figured out how to get pressurized air into the diving bell.”

 **HERMANN:** “The same Halley as in the comet.”

 **NEWT:** “The very same. But back to what I was saying about whales –“

 **HERMANN:** “How did you know I wanted to talk about whales in this episode, by the way?”

 **NEWT:** “Because _I_ wanted to talk about how kaiju don’t get the bends! Like sperm whales!”

 **HERMANN:** “That could be a whole podcast episode in and of itself.”

 **NEWT:** “Oh, _could_ it? Please?!”

 **HERMANN:** [laughs] “We’ll put it in the queue.”

 **NEWT:** “But I want to give a teaser here now. Getting back to the whales. So before we got sidetracked, I mentioned that sperm whales are some of the deepest diving animals that we know of. But they’re _mammals_ , meaning they have to constantly come back up to the surface for air! “

 **HERMANN:** “Dealing with changes in pressure – and it’s really the change in pressure that’s the big problem, not the high pressure, since many animals have adapted to life deep under the ocean.”

 **NEWT:** “These whales, though. Cetaceans. They actually have lungs and ribcages that are _designed_ to collapse under high pressure. And – spoiler alert – I have just finished some very incredible analyses on aforementioned kaiju guts that suggest the same might be true of kaiju.”

 **HERMANN:** “The aforementioned guts that will not be adorning my chalkboard."

 **NEWT:** "Sure thing, dude."

 **HERMANN:** [sighs] "The collapsing. That isn’t the entire story though.”

 **NEWT:** “Oh, no, of course not. It gets way more interesting than that. I'll tell everyone right now, I'm going to be talking about hemoglobin levels. If that doesn't whet everyone's appetites, nothing will. Hah! Like you said, we should do a whole episode on this.”

 **HERMANN:** “All right, we will. Back to Conn-Pods.”

 **NEWT:** “I knew you’d know that little factoid about Halley’s Comet. You little space champion, you.”

 **HERMANN:** “Shush.”

 

==

 

 **NEWT:** “Lots of battles happen right up here on the surface, but the jaeger engineers anticipated all those attempts to bomb the Breach – obviously, none of which have been successful yet, which is why Hermann and I are still here! But yeah, they anticipated that, and took that into account when the jaegers were first designed. You know what’d help us understand robots walking around deep under the ocean, right, Hermann?”

 **HERMANN:** “Submarines, my dear colleague.”

 **NEWT:** “And gosh, I just _know_ you would love to enlighten our listeners with how submarines work. Physics is your jam, Hermann. Go for it.”

 **HERMANN:** “To understand how the jaegers don’t collapse under high pressure, yes, it would serve us well to understand how submarines work, although they don’t quite operate under the same reasoning. The concise answer is: shape and material. Deep underwater, the pressure is coming from all sides. Therefore, the more spherical, the better the machine would be at withstanding pressure. That is why you often see submarines with a cigar-like shape. The roundness of that hull allows it to keep holding off the pressure from all around. Obviously, the jaegers aren’t round. The strength of the jaeger comes from the material it’s built form. The Conn-Pod itself is, however, in case of any leakage or damage to the jaeger so that the pilots inside would be in a sort of ersatz spherical submarine if separated from the robot underwater. It is a built-in failsafe.”

 

==

 

 **HERMANN:** "You have anything else?" 

 **NEWT:** "I got nothing." 

 **HERMANN:** "Well, then, if you want to read the article, head over to our website and type 'Conn-Pod' - that's C-O-N-N hyphen P-O-D into the handy search bar, and since I said 'handy search bar,' that means it's time for listener mail." 

[chime sound effect]

 **NEWT:** [heaves a sigh] "Wow, Hermann. This week was crazy. We'll look back on this week and think of it as 'The Great Raleigh Becket Firestorm of 2024.'" 

 **HERMANN:** [nervous laughter] "We were inundated with angry listener emails." 

 **NEWT:** "It was your fault, by the way." 

 **HERMANN:** "I don't care. It was just as much your fault as it was mine. You didn't correct me." 

 **NEWT:** "It was just a slip of the tongue! I ignored it! I didn't think this many people would catch it!" 

 **HERMANN:** [sighs] "For those of you who didn't catch last week's episode 'What's the Deal with the Pons Technology Patent Controversy?' we… MAY have slightly slipped up. Ever so slightly." 

 **NEWT:** "Hermann – _Hermann_ , I want to emphasize -- accidentally said that Stacker Pentecost was the only jaeger pilot to have completed a fight solo." 

 **HERMANN:** "I MEANT to say 'one of'! ONE OF the only two pilots." 

 **NEWT:** "I knew what you meant, that's why it didn't occur to me to correct you." 

 **HERMANN:** "You mean, it was just as much your fault as it was mine." 

 **NEWT:** "No, it was your fault." 

 **HERMANN:** "No, it was your fault too." 

 **NEWT:** "Shut up, Hermann."

 **HERMANN:** "It was a slip of the tongue. A verbal typo." 

 **NEWT:** "We're sorry, listeners. Listeners, Hermann Gottlieb means Raleigh Becket no offense. He means him no harm! He was just too wrapped up in his hero-worship of Stacker Pentecost." 

 **HERMANN:** "Maybe they all missed 'How Drift Compatibility Works.' We definitely mentioned Ranger Becket, Marshal Pentecost, and that particular fact about solo fights in that episode." 

 **NEWT:** "That was a really old one, though." 

 **HERMANN:** "Maybe we should redo that one at some point." 

 **NEWT:** "Some of those old episodes I just want to move past, but Drift compatibility definitely is worth a revisit." 

 **HERMANN:** "I am in agreement with you there, Newton." [heaves another sigh] "Moving on. Read a different listener mail. We covered the Firestorm, so pick another one to read." 

 **NEWT:** "All right, here's one from Katie: 'Hi guys, big fan of the podcast! I live inland so I haven't been as impacted by the Kaiju attacks as some other folks have, so your podcast has been a really great way for me to not feel so isolated from what's going on the world. My brother works for the PPDC as one of the auxiliary units in the helicopters, though. He is responsible for relaying jaegers to the kaiju. I would love for you to do a podcast on all the extra people you don't always hear about who still contribute a lot to the kaiju war like him.' So, I wrote her back and said that was a great idea, and you certainly don't always hear a lot about the inner workings of the PPDC. We'll definitely keep that in mind for a future episode." 

 **HERMANN:** "Well, that's it for this episode. Remember, you can tweet to us at KSYSKPodcast - that's one word - or send us a good, old-fashioned email." 

 **NEWT:** "Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it to ksysk@pddc.com."

 

[closing music]

 

**Author's Note:**

> No copyright infringement intended and also, no offense intended. I know this fic was _super weird_ , but I guess it was just my bizarre way of expressing my love. "KSYSK AU" is my love letter to both Newton/Hermann and Stuff You Should Know. 
> 
> Article: [Diving bell](http://www.howstuffworks.com/outdoor-activities/water-sports/diving-bell.htm)


End file.
